Apossum
07-01-2007, 09:43 PM
heya. it's pretty much done, so hopefully this is an enjoyable read for folks. Feel free to comment on flow, grammar, anything, or laugh at me for giving the game a 10 :)
A Rich Man’s Asteroids
Filling the same role for the PS3 as 2005’s Geometry Wars did for the Xbox 360, Super Stardust HD is a title sure to take people’s minds off of the PS3’s post-launch game draught. Due to similarities in style, many gamers, including myself, falsely assumed this would be a clone of the aforementioned 360 title. However, the game’s history extends back to 1993 when plain old Stardust was released on the now-obscure Amiga, where it displayed in 256 measly colors, rather than in 720p. Fourteen years and several game generations later, Super Stardust HD is determined to transcend its cult-classic status by using the PS3’s profusion of horsepower to create one of the best looking and most intense gaming experiences of the current generation, full retail releases included. Though it only has three modes of play, the gameplay is intense, varied, and addicting enough to warrant plenty of compulsive attempts to best your previous high score, as well as those of others on the online scoreboards. At only $8 dollars on the Playstation Network, there’s no reason not to download it, as every aspect of its production is spot-on.
It’s immediately obvious how beautiful this game is. Given its relatively small scale, using the PS3’s power to render its graphics up to 1080p and in widescreen is the equivalent of squashing a spider with an atom bomb. There isn’t a graphical flaw worth mentioning and the frame rate is flawless the entire time. The gameplay takes place on a spherical grid which surrounds each of five separate planets and serves as the battleground between your ship, copious amounts of incoming asteroids, various enemies, and bosses. Everything is rendered fully in 3D, including the clouds in the Hubble telescope inspired backgrounds, and everything is appropriately textured and lit to pop out at you. Once the asteroids start raining on the playing field, the grid becomes a very hectic mixture of bright particles, explosions, fire, asteroid chunks, lasers, enemies, and power-ups. The combined effect will make your jaw drop over and over as you go through wave after wave of glorious, explosive carnage. The graphics are supplemented by adequate sound design and there isn’t much to say about it other than that it works. There are plenty of loud booms, crackles, laser gun noises and the like, which is what one expects from a shooter. Though I don’t own a 5.1 system, I imagine that it would sound amazing on one. The music is good too—the beat driven, retro sci-fi techno tracks for each stage are perfect for the game. Once the playing field really heats up with action, Super Stardust HD will take over your senses and hook you for hours to come. The foundation of its formula is tied together by the amazing asteroids.
The asteroids completely steal the show. Extra care was put into making them look and react to fire as realistic as possible. They rain down in sizes ranging from tiny rocks to craggy boulders that cover close to half of your visible playing field. As they are shot up, they crack and break into smaller chunks that fly in all directions, letting off a cloud of particles and explosions, while releasing a satisfying boom in your subwoofer. The physics allow for them to bounce off of each other making for several situations in which you must predict a safe flight path through them while blasting away. They all move at varying speeds and it’s not uncommon for a careening asteroid chunk to blindside you as you are working on clearing out a section of the grid.
Those intense moments are what Super Stardust HD is all about. The game plays out on five separate planets of increasing difficulty, each with five phases of enemies and a boss fight in the fifth and final phase. The asteroids and enemies drop on to the grid, often deliberately in your path or on all sides of your ship. Parts of the grid are highlighted a moment before an asteroid or enemy drops, allowing for some time to maneuver and destroy them. All the enemy types will keep you on your toes since they are all actively trying to kill you. A key aspect of the gameplay involves asteroid management--a task that constantly needs tending to, often taking priority as you dodge enemies and attempt to get into more open air. These enemies make for some incredible phases, but the boss fights are obviously less intense and their designs seem somewhat uninspired. The first two bosses are different from each other, and then the next two planets use a pair of each boss type from the previous planets. This was a bit of a letdown. Since I already knew the patterns from before, taking on two of one type wasn’t much more difficult. The fifth boss also has a boring design, but also puts you up against one of the thicker asteroid fields in the game, making it appropriately tense. Otherwise, the boss fights are a vacation from the usual gameplay. While shooting and dodging is fun in its self, Super Stardust HD boasts a fairly robust weapon system.
The action is incredibly intense, so luckily, your ship is equipped with three guns and bombs to aid your obliteration of the onslaught, as well as a boost to get you out of tight spots. Each gun is optimal for destroying the three types of asteroids they correspond to, and each enemy has a type of fire that it’s weak to and strong to as well. Each gun can increase in speed and strength by picking up “tokens” that neon green boulders leave behind. The tokens add yet even more urgency to the gameplay because they degrade every few seconds. Usually, they are just point bonuses, less often are gun power ups, on occasion a one-hit absorbing shield will appear, and once in a blue moon, an extra ship icon pops out. Each token degrades to the next power up under it though, so picking them up while they are still a desired item is a challenge in its self. Other times, waiting for a gun power up you need is key, which will take some skills to pull off if you’re being tailed by enemies and asteroids are coming at you from every direction.
With all these elements going at once, Super Stardust HD’s sheer intensity is unrivalled. It’s not as sadistically difficult as it may sound though. As each planet is beaten in Arcade mode, it’s unlocked for practice in Planet mode, in which you can play a single planet at a time. Since each planet is more difficult than the last, this allows the player to get good at various levels before taking it all on at once. More experienced gamers may even find Super Stardust HD somewhat easy at first, though the last two planets will pose a challenge for anyone. Once the fifth planet is beaten in Arcade mode, the game starts over at the beginning in Hard mode, which is noticeably faster and more hectic. I hear there is another difficulty after that, but my skills were not honed enough to get there at the time of this review. Unfortunately, the difficulty can’t be toggled from the menu, meaning you will have to beat the fifth planet each time before going into the higher levels. There’s also a co-op mode that’s a blast to play. In my short time with it, I took away the idea that it requires a lot of coordination, namely because it isn’t split screen and the camera won’t follow one player off the screen. Ultimately, the goal in any mode is a high score, as it is with all shooters. As you blast through the hordes, you attain multipliers, and upon completion of a phase, you attain bonuses based on your multiplier level. At game over, your score is uploaded to an online leader board, where you can compare yourself to the people on your friends list and wonder how the hell the top ranked people got such ridiculously high scores.
Super Stardust HD is an amazing experience on all accounts from gameplay to presentation. Many unsuspecting gamers will be overjoyed to find so much classic action in such a small package. I hope that as PS3 sales pick up, this game attains the classic status it deserves. There isn’t much to criticize at all. My main qualms rest with the somewhat easy and uninspired bosses and absence of a difficulty option. Otherwise, I might have liked to see an online co-op or an endless mode, but these criticisms are afterthoughts in the face of what’s here. In the grand scheme of the gaming medium, where complete satisfaction with a title is a rarity, where quantity often takes precedence over quality, and where a $60 game with a multi-million dollar budget doesn’t necessarily guarantee you a memorable experience, Super Stardust HD stands out as an anomaly—one you can’t pass up if you have a PS3 or get one in the future
10/10
A Rich Man’s Asteroids
Filling the same role for the PS3 as 2005’s Geometry Wars did for the Xbox 360, Super Stardust HD is a title sure to take people’s minds off of the PS3’s post-launch game draught. Due to similarities in style, many gamers, including myself, falsely assumed this would be a clone of the aforementioned 360 title. However, the game’s history extends back to 1993 when plain old Stardust was released on the now-obscure Amiga, where it displayed in 256 measly colors, rather than in 720p. Fourteen years and several game generations later, Super Stardust HD is determined to transcend its cult-classic status by using the PS3’s profusion of horsepower to create one of the best looking and most intense gaming experiences of the current generation, full retail releases included. Though it only has three modes of play, the gameplay is intense, varied, and addicting enough to warrant plenty of compulsive attempts to best your previous high score, as well as those of others on the online scoreboards. At only $8 dollars on the Playstation Network, there’s no reason not to download it, as every aspect of its production is spot-on.
It’s immediately obvious how beautiful this game is. Given its relatively small scale, using the PS3’s power to render its graphics up to 1080p and in widescreen is the equivalent of squashing a spider with an atom bomb. There isn’t a graphical flaw worth mentioning and the frame rate is flawless the entire time. The gameplay takes place on a spherical grid which surrounds each of five separate planets and serves as the battleground between your ship, copious amounts of incoming asteroids, various enemies, and bosses. Everything is rendered fully in 3D, including the clouds in the Hubble telescope inspired backgrounds, and everything is appropriately textured and lit to pop out at you. Once the asteroids start raining on the playing field, the grid becomes a very hectic mixture of bright particles, explosions, fire, asteroid chunks, lasers, enemies, and power-ups. The combined effect will make your jaw drop over and over as you go through wave after wave of glorious, explosive carnage. The graphics are supplemented by adequate sound design and there isn’t much to say about it other than that it works. There are plenty of loud booms, crackles, laser gun noises and the like, which is what one expects from a shooter. Though I don’t own a 5.1 system, I imagine that it would sound amazing on one. The music is good too—the beat driven, retro sci-fi techno tracks for each stage are perfect for the game. Once the playing field really heats up with action, Super Stardust HD will take over your senses and hook you for hours to come. The foundation of its formula is tied together by the amazing asteroids.
The asteroids completely steal the show. Extra care was put into making them look and react to fire as realistic as possible. They rain down in sizes ranging from tiny rocks to craggy boulders that cover close to half of your visible playing field. As they are shot up, they crack and break into smaller chunks that fly in all directions, letting off a cloud of particles and explosions, while releasing a satisfying boom in your subwoofer. The physics allow for them to bounce off of each other making for several situations in which you must predict a safe flight path through them while blasting away. They all move at varying speeds and it’s not uncommon for a careening asteroid chunk to blindside you as you are working on clearing out a section of the grid.
Those intense moments are what Super Stardust HD is all about. The game plays out on five separate planets of increasing difficulty, each with five phases of enemies and a boss fight in the fifth and final phase. The asteroids and enemies drop on to the grid, often deliberately in your path or on all sides of your ship. Parts of the grid are highlighted a moment before an asteroid or enemy drops, allowing for some time to maneuver and destroy them. All the enemy types will keep you on your toes since they are all actively trying to kill you. A key aspect of the gameplay involves asteroid management--a task that constantly needs tending to, often taking priority as you dodge enemies and attempt to get into more open air. These enemies make for some incredible phases, but the boss fights are obviously less intense and their designs seem somewhat uninspired. The first two bosses are different from each other, and then the next two planets use a pair of each boss type from the previous planets. This was a bit of a letdown. Since I already knew the patterns from before, taking on two of one type wasn’t much more difficult. The fifth boss also has a boring design, but also puts you up against one of the thicker asteroid fields in the game, making it appropriately tense. Otherwise, the boss fights are a vacation from the usual gameplay. While shooting and dodging is fun in its self, Super Stardust HD boasts a fairly robust weapon system.
The action is incredibly intense, so luckily, your ship is equipped with three guns and bombs to aid your obliteration of the onslaught, as well as a boost to get you out of tight spots. Each gun is optimal for destroying the three types of asteroids they correspond to, and each enemy has a type of fire that it’s weak to and strong to as well. Each gun can increase in speed and strength by picking up “tokens” that neon green boulders leave behind. The tokens add yet even more urgency to the gameplay because they degrade every few seconds. Usually, they are just point bonuses, less often are gun power ups, on occasion a one-hit absorbing shield will appear, and once in a blue moon, an extra ship icon pops out. Each token degrades to the next power up under it though, so picking them up while they are still a desired item is a challenge in its self. Other times, waiting for a gun power up you need is key, which will take some skills to pull off if you’re being tailed by enemies and asteroids are coming at you from every direction.
With all these elements going at once, Super Stardust HD’s sheer intensity is unrivalled. It’s not as sadistically difficult as it may sound though. As each planet is beaten in Arcade mode, it’s unlocked for practice in Planet mode, in which you can play a single planet at a time. Since each planet is more difficult than the last, this allows the player to get good at various levels before taking it all on at once. More experienced gamers may even find Super Stardust HD somewhat easy at first, though the last two planets will pose a challenge for anyone. Once the fifth planet is beaten in Arcade mode, the game starts over at the beginning in Hard mode, which is noticeably faster and more hectic. I hear there is another difficulty after that, but my skills were not honed enough to get there at the time of this review. Unfortunately, the difficulty can’t be toggled from the menu, meaning you will have to beat the fifth planet each time before going into the higher levels. There’s also a co-op mode that’s a blast to play. In my short time with it, I took away the idea that it requires a lot of coordination, namely because it isn’t split screen and the camera won’t follow one player off the screen. Ultimately, the goal in any mode is a high score, as it is with all shooters. As you blast through the hordes, you attain multipliers, and upon completion of a phase, you attain bonuses based on your multiplier level. At game over, your score is uploaded to an online leader board, where you can compare yourself to the people on your friends list and wonder how the hell the top ranked people got such ridiculously high scores.
Super Stardust HD is an amazing experience on all accounts from gameplay to presentation. Many unsuspecting gamers will be overjoyed to find so much classic action in such a small package. I hope that as PS3 sales pick up, this game attains the classic status it deserves. There isn’t much to criticize at all. My main qualms rest with the somewhat easy and uninspired bosses and absence of a difficulty option. Otherwise, I might have liked to see an online co-op or an endless mode, but these criticisms are afterthoughts in the face of what’s here. In the grand scheme of the gaming medium, where complete satisfaction with a title is a rarity, where quantity often takes precedence over quality, and where a $60 game with a multi-million dollar budget doesn’t necessarily guarantee you a memorable experience, Super Stardust HD stands out as an anomaly—one you can’t pass up if you have a PS3 or get one in the future
10/10